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vForum LiveBlog for Day 2 Keynote

Wednesday, October 27, 2010 Category : vForum, VMware 0

If the technology comes together I hope to live blog the keynote from Day 2 at Sydney vForum.

Feel free to join the conversation.

Rodos

vForum Sydney Solution Exchange Booth Awards

Tuesday, October 26, 2010 Category : Cisco, Dell, VCE, vForum, VMware 0

In the tradition of social media we bring you the first ever (and possibly last) vForum booth awards. Success is based on a top secret criteria of awarding points in several random and sarcastic categories, as well as a little honest opinion.

Rodney Haywood and Alastair Cooke (@DemitasseNZ /www.demitasse.co.nz ) have dedicated minutes of their time to bringing you the best and worst of the booths, saving your the arduous journey through the crowds.

In no particular order, our awardees are:

Dedication to Booth Duty Award

Not a booth award, this is a personal award for the person who has shown outstanding effort above and beyond the call of duty.

David Caddick of Quest Software wins this award for still coming to, and standing, at the Quest booth all day, after requiring four stitches in his leg this morning. David’s enthusiasm for an early jog lead him to a lacerating encounter with the back stairs.

Well done David for not giving up and being there.

The Is There Anybody Home Award

This award recognises the booth that is there but fails to deliver a visible presence of life. Is there a positive message from having a booth with nothing to deliver your message?

Charles Sturt university wins this award for the apparent absence of life or anything informative (apart from a mobile Esky). The presence of cold beer in said Esky would have removed this booth from eligibility for this award, alas it was a case of a pub with no beer.

Thank you, come again.

The Puritan’s Booth Babe Award.

This award is inspired by Thomas Dureya’s annual effort to decrease the amount of clothing worn by vForum Booth Babes. Our puritan family values cannot condone the use of the scantily clad female form in a male dominated event as a marketing tool, hence our award goes to the Booth Babes presenting the height of puritan values.

The award goes to the VCE booth where the Booth Babes were covered from ankle to neck, along with modest head coverings. This is an excellent representation of Slip, Slop, Slap that would survive even a summers day on Bondi Beach.

We are very pleased to see a number of women on booths with excellent technical knowledge, not simply Booth Babes.

Show Me The Hardware Award

This award is to recognise the hardware vendor who has failed to show their product. Attendees are all interested in viewing and discussing your wares, which is hard if there is only a brochure.

The award goes to Dell, one of the largest server and storage hardware vendors, who only had a few laptops on their stand showing powerpoint. We were not the only critics to notice the lack of tin.

Maybe it’s all in the cloud.

Bravery Award

This award goes to a vendor that has gone the furthest and taken the risks. The unkind could call them cowboys, but we call them courageous.

The award goes to the brave boys at CoRAID, a new entrant into the storage market in Australia. With little local sales presence and only imminent VMware HCL support they nonetheless braved the big money vendors and brought actual hardware with blinking lights. Great to see them giving it a go in this crowded space.

Bigger and better next year.

Interactive Playground Award

This award is for the booth where the geeks got to play. vForum is for engaging and learning, this award celebrates booths that do this well.

The award goes to Cisco whose booth had a structured schedule of open briefings on their products, with excellent giveaways. There were a number of blades to touch and look at their insides, the hardware wasn’t just there it was there to be investigated. There were numerous technical people who sought questions to answer.

Geeks delivering to Geeks.

Buffet Award

This award recognises the booth with the broadest range of products and solutions visible. There needs to be something for everyone and the whole family should go home having had their fill.

The award goes to VMware who, despite being their event, showed an enormous range of products at a detailed level, every product was actually there to be touched and used. More than a dozen products were identifiable from distance and there were experts on them all.

No one trick Pony.

Most Appealing Booth Award

This award recognises the booth that stands out and draws you to it, with so many booths it becomes a blur. Something different must greet the eye.

The award goes to Trend Micro for their appealing Carnival theme, from a distance you could see it wasn’t your ordinary booth. With the space limitations and sundry restrictions placed by event organisers it takes effort to stand out.

Who says conferences are all a circus?

Thanks to all the exhibitors who make the event so valuable. Congratulations to the winners. All those that didn’t make this years list should be planning for next year’s awards.

Rodos and Alastair

CORAID

Tuesday, September 07, 2010 Category : Storage, vForum, VMware 1

You meet some interesting vendors on the show floor at VMworld. One I ran into was CORAID, who have an interesting idea of not using Fibre Channel or iSCSI as the transport for storage connectivity, instead they use ATA over Ethernet (AoE). Certainly something I had not heard of before, but with all the noise around FCoE and FCoTR why not AoE.

By using commodity hardware and lightweight Ethernet vendors like CORAID can reduce the cost of deploying storage arrays. They have a range of hardware, although they don't have certification on the VMware HCL yet. I believe certification is coming soon.

CORAID have some interesting founders who have come from such places as VMware and Kidaro.

The main reason I wanted to mention them was because they are going to be present at VMware vForum in Sydney Australia on October 26th to 27th. If you are going along why don't you check out CORAID are all about. Its great to see these vendors which you come across in the US starting to take interest in Australia and attending the local conferences.

Rodos

VMware vForum Australia 2009

Sunday, November 01, 2009 Category : vForum, VMware 0

On 27th and 28th of October 2009 VMware held its user conference vForum in Sydney Australia. With over 2100 attendees combined with 40 partners and vendors who were exhibiting it was one of the biggest IT events in Australia for the year.

A number of key representatives from VMware were in attendance including Carl Eschenbach, Executive VP of Worldwide Field Ops, Steve Herrod, Chief Technology Officer and Scott Drummonds, Technical Marketing Engineer in the area of performance.

Here is my video summary or montage of the event.

What were the highlights of the event?

The PCoIP demonstration performed by David Wakeman in Steve Herrods keynote was by far the best. The demo compared a RDP session to a PCoIP session at both 1ms and 180ms latency, the differences between the two were amazing. You can read a news report that contains a video of it.
An awards night was held with customers and partners receiving recognition across a number of categories. You can read the list of recipients and see some photos at the CRN article.
It was mentioned that Australia is the most virtualised country in the world (per capita pop) more so than many other OECD country.

As I was on booth duty and presented a session I was not able to attend many sessions. I did some live tweeting from the sessions I did attend, here is a cut down list of my Tweets from the two days.

Welcome to Day 1 of #VMware #vForum in Sydney, Australia
VMware #vforum http://mypict.me/1cCfQ
Carl Eschenback presenting his keynote at #vForum
#vForum keynote is full, people registered and turned up.
Carl 3 steps to virt journy. IT Production, Business Production to Virt IT (virt first). Start with savings and move to bus agility #vForum
Carl on stage at #vForum http://mypict.me/1cDVx
Cloud bingo. Carl just said Cloud, he he #vForum
"Cloud is real and not just hype" Carl E, #vForum keynote
Don't fragment Ur DC with silos of diff hypervisors. Simplyfy. #vForum keynote
Carl tells how MelbIT upgraded to vSphere over lunch on the day of the launch. #vForum keynote
Is cloud evolutionary or revolutionary? Delivering ITaaS within your DC. Carl keynote #vForum
#vForum take the benefits of the cloud and use them in Ur DC. Build Ur private cloud. Then federate with providers. Carl.
Carl lists three local partners building the federated Cloud; Optus, MelbIT & Telstra. #vForum
Carl talking about CapacityIQ. Wonder if he knows it does not work with v4. #vForum keynote
Carl says the Cloud providers may integrate with VMware GO for cloud workload ingestion. #vForum keynote
Carl E, "2010 will be the tipping point for VDI". #vForum
perational cost savings. Carl keynote
#vForum Capital cost of VDI is getting lower but focus on the o
"Provision users not devices. Let the personality move in time and space." #vForum
Why Vmware will will in VDI? Platform, management and best user experience. Carl E #vForum
Carl now talking about SpringSource! Fantastic. IMHO spring is key for VMware long term future. PaaS #vForum keynote
Congratulations to my competitor Dimension Data for their win as regional partner of the year at #vForum. Well done.
Heading home from big day @ #vForum. Over 1100 people rego'd for my session tomrw! Where did they all get the imprsn it would be that good?
Welcome to day two of VMware #vForum ANZ. #vForumAust
Will be doing tweets from Steve @herrod 's keynote this morning at VMware #vForum
Lots of people entering the keynote at #vForum http://mypict.me/1dxJ2
#fail #vForumAust hash tag promoted at start of keynote. Do I keep boycotting and only use #vForum? I think so.
Herrod @ #vForum: CTO of the year now on stage
Herrod @ #vForum: doing desktop first with View. Mentions Win7
Herrod @ #vForum: Provision a person not a device. The term desktop does not make sense anymore.
Herrod @ #vForum: XP and W7 are tier one workloads that vSphere was desined for.
Herrod @ #vForum: intel 5500 does desktop workolads grt as does flash storage.
Herrod @ #vForum: Demo uf desktop use experience coming.
Herrod @ #vForum: Best experience to the type of device Ur on, even if offline. WAN, LAN, local. PCoIP and CVP
Herrod @ #vForum: PCoIP, pure software, bandwidth aware, lossless if required, screen aware. Build to scale through diff use cases.
Herrod @ #vForum: David Wakeman doing the View demo. Go buddy! Good luck.
Herrod @ #vForum: 1ms latency was good. Now doing 180ms. Amazing difference. PCoIP works great at high latency.
Herrod @ #vForum: why did they not do a demo of PCoIP like Wakemans at VMworld? Great
Herrod @ #vForum: Talking about BYOD with Fusion 3 and Workstation 7 or future bare metal hypervisor. Good for securty as well as img std.
Herrod @ #vForum: Pocket cloud from Wyse.
Herrod @ #vForum: Now moving to vSphere. 3m enginering hours.
Herrod @ #vForum: VMotion joke about saving mariages got a laugh just like it did at VMworld!
Herrod @ #vForum: Great flexability through storage and network vMotion. Plus partners working hard on VMotion between DCs
Herrod @ #vForum: "The myth that U can't ran DBs and high end workloads has now been dispelled."
Herrod @ #vForum: DRS being extended to include I/O
Herrod @ #vForum: DPM is server degrag!
Herrod @ #vForum: We forget in IT that nothing matters at the end appart from applications.
Herrod @ #vForum: Lab Manager, the signature avoidance tool.
Herrod @ #vForum: Sharing the size of the VMworld lab setup. What no photos or video?
Herrod @ #vForum: Cloud bingo. Now doing cloud information.
Herrod @ #vForum: Discussing challenges with Federation. Supporting the use case for internal cloud. Also federating Ur own multiple DCs.
Herrod @ #vForum: Follow the moon computing. Chase the cheapest elec around the world.
Herrod @ #vForum: vCloud being discussed. I love the API.
Herrod @ #vForum: Spring logo, I wonder if Spring will be discussed?
Herrod @ #vForum: Yes Spring is being discussed in relation to vApps. Trad vs future app architecture. Removing the tenticles.
Herrod @ #vForum: "Spring is an application framework" leading to PaaS discussion to support it.
Herrod @ #vForum: Love hearing @herrod talk on Spring. 1 of the times we see his true intellect and comp sci bckgrnd rathr than mrkting fig
#vForum MelbIT: Hosting is not Cloud, we know, we are the largest hosting provider in the country. (Here here!)
#vForum MelbIT: Glenn is having a customer talk about their experience.
#vForum MelbIT: vCloud Express. Customers like the quick or lack of sales cycle.
#vForum MelbIT: The developer on stage is manually scaling their enviro. IMHO in future with Spring &/or vCloud API they can automate this.
#vForum MelbIT: Glenn talking about upredictable billing. Mainly around intrnet bandwidth. (but this is not a nsrly prob with private cloud)
#vForum MelbIT: Going to offer cap plans or insurance plans to balance peak and non peak months.
#vForum MelbIT: Seeing lots of security incidents around these public Cloud internet facing VMs.
#vForum MelbIT: Melb Cup site used hybrid Cloud of AWS with MelbIT
#vForum MelbIT: Thinks people will use multiple Cloud providers of different features and specialities. (Agreed)
#vForum MelbIT: The chllnge. Get Ur app provdrs 2 build for horz scale that the cloud delivrs well. (Place for Spring and PaaS driving IaaS)
#vForum : @hartmant from VMware talking about vCloud
#vForum VMware talking about vClould API use cases, also the GUI and vCenter Plugin. Contrast to Express
#vForum VMware saying U may want to upgrade to vSphere top be ready to Federate with vCloud
#vForum VCloud GUI will be baed on Java rather than .net according to VMware
#vForum Everyone enjoying the networking detail slide of vCloud. Everyone leaning forward and squinting.

Here is some linkage to other photos, videos and comments.

Andre's Photos
Short video of the main stage.

Thanks VMware for a great event, we all look forward to next year.